Powdercoat fun!

A few weeks ago I decided to buy a cheap powdercoat machine to play with. Cost $65 on eBay, I bought it because it looked better than the somewhat cheesy one sold at Harbor Freight. Unfortunately, it turned out to be the same machine! They used a different picture in the auction. Oh well, I decided to try it out:

Kevin (Xlint89) sent me his bars to practice on, as I didn't want to screw up any of my parts on this experiment! But I was working on one of my freebie Kawi standups, and the PJS intake grate was a good candidate as well. No paint left on it to strip off! But a decent part. So I gave it a quick wire wheel, and shot the parts:

The bars were too big to bake in my oven, but I had a little box built to extend the size:

The finished product:

They're not perfect, but turned out pretty good I think! I was very happy about my intake grate, I didn't do much prep work on it and yet the part seemed to turn out great.

The nasty cast pieces such as intake grates and the like, need to be "outgassed". Put the oven at about 5-600* and precook the part for an hour or so in a well ventilated area. It cooks all the oils and junk out, and then reclean the part one last time and whamo, it'll come out perfect everytime.